The transportation and storage of large or heavy objects is carried out in many instances by placing the objects in a truck, railcar or storage container. Fiberglass insulation batts, for example, are highly compressed and packaged in large packages for shipping from a manufacturing facility to a distribution or storage location. Efforts to reduce transportation costs, particularly for a material such as fiberglass insulation batts, have resulted in increased emphasis on larger and larger packages. For a compressible material such as fiberglass insulation, multiple bags of insulation batts are packaged together into a sleeve package for further compression and resulting shipping and storage economies. The increased bulk and weight of these packages present difficulties in manually handling the units and shipping packages. Sleeve packages of insulation material typically weigh 90 to 100 pounds, and can weigh as much as 150 pounds. It is advantageous to design the units and shipping packages to have generally equal face dimensions (i.e., a generally square face) so that the packages can be manually cartwheeled on the ground at the construction or installation site. This is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,350,063 to Berdan, II.
Some trucks carrying insulation units and shipping packages are unloaded at locations having loading docks, and are unloaded either manually or with the aid of a forklift truck. In some situations, however, trucks and other transportation or storage containers must be unloaded in places where a loading dock is not available. A problem faced by those required to manually unload a semitrailer from the ground is the issue of how to get the first unit or shipping package safely off the truck without climbing up on the potentially unstable load of insulation packages. It is important that the person unloading the truck not be in the path of any of the packages as they tumble to the ground from the truck.
It is known to use a retractable loop on the end of a pole to remove articles from a truck, as evidenced by U.S. Pat. No. 5,538,302 to Travis. The method suggested by this patent includes securing the loop around the article after the article is already positioned inside the truck.
It would be advantageous if a method could be developed to increase the ease with which units and shipping packages of various materials could be effectively removed from a truck or other container without requiring the unloader to climb up on the load of insulation packages. Such a method would also preferably insure that the unloader would be out of the path of the package as the packages tumble to the ground from the truck.